A Feasible Approach to Projecting Household Demand for the Digital Ruble in Russia

We estimated a model of households’ usage of alternative payment instruments (cash and bank cards) using a new dataset from a survey of Russian households. In our modelling set-up, households’ preferences are determined by the instruments’ perceived attributes and hence their choice regarding payment methods depends on the differences across instruments in these attributes. The results indicate a statistically significant sensitivity of consumer choice to the perceived attributes. We employ the estimated model to evaluate the demand for CBDC depending on its expected design and consumers’ perception of it. We discuss several illustrative projections to demonstrate the application of the tool developed. The predicted utilisation of CBDC varies considerably depending on the attributes hypothesised, although under the conservative assumptions, the projected use of CBDC in household transactions is limited